Of All Unbroken Things
by polar-realm
Summary: Jean/Clare. A conversation on the road north, and the fine line between strength and weakness.


They're resting at the side of a riverbank on the way north, late in the day with their shadows falling black across the dry ground, wilderness ahead and wilderness behind them. For all she wants to travel quickly, Clare understands the need for a moment to take stock of supplies and repair their equipment before the long trek ahead, one last chance to feel the sun on their skin before winter takes over. She's thinking about Riful again, picking over details, chances, everything that could have gone wrong and didn't. Jean sits beside her, sharpening her sword, all attention bent to the task like it's the only thing in the world that has ever needed doing. Jean is always like that. Even fighting, there's nothing to her but focus.

And that reminds her – the battle beneath the earth, Jean's raw power, the sacrifice of versatility it demands. If anything can catch at her own concentration, send it scattering and refracting, it's the puzzle of such a deliberate limitation, in a fighter who cares so little for superficial strength.

"I've been thinking about that drill sword of yours," she says. "It's a powerful technique, but..."

Jean pauses in her work, intent now on listening, and Clare falls abruptly silent as it occurs to her what she's saying, and to whom. It's her habit to analyze, but not out loud, and never to criticize another – _a single-digit_ – to her face. Dangerous, that. Not here, not now, but even so. She'll need to watch herself more closely, when they rejoin the soldiers in the North.

"But it limits me," Jean says, very nearly smiling. "Strong, but too slow. That's what you were going to say, right?"

From anyone else, those words would be prelude to a challenge, but Clare knows it isn't so now. Her new companion is resolutely placid, imperturbable, and she holds to a strange sort of honor of her own devising, one that has nothing to do with rank or bravado. Maybe that's why Clare has gotten so comfortable now, after all her time alone, so quick to leave her thoughts unguarded. Or perhaps it's an older flaw, a different weakness altogether – a dusty-haired human boy trailing behind her unasked, slowing her pace and reshaping her path, Ilena telling her exactly _why_ Teresa had died. One crack in a wall left too long unattended, and the whole edifice comes tumbling.

Jean lifts her blade to the light and considers it for a moment, traces a finger lightly along the killing edge.

"My father was a hunter," she says at last. "He always told me that if I didn't have it in me to kill an animal quickly and cleanly, I had no business trying to kill it at all. I doubt he ever meant me to use what he taught for hunting yoma, but he made me promise that I never would. And I never did."

She goes still then, preoccupied, and when she speaks again, her voice is quieter.

"The way that yoma kill... It isn't clean."

_Not quick either_, Clare thinks, but there's nothing to be gained by dwelling on that. Past is past, and dead is dead, and there's no changing either. Even as a child, she had understood that much.

"Are you saying this world would be any different," she asks, "if it was?"

Jean just looks at her, and then down into the rushing water, like she's watching from somewhere far, far away. Her aura is calm, but Clare senses currents there that she doesn't know how to navigate, swift and dark and ready to pull her under.

"Jean," she says, and the other turns back, startlingly direct, catches her wrists in a too-strong grip and does not look away again. She can feel the warmth of Jean's hands bleeding through her skin, the steady pressure, but it's Jean's eyes that hold her fast, and the memory of chains and hollow places, walls left to crumble and a fortress falling around her as she speaks.

"What I'm saying..." Jean says, and she does smile this time – thinly, wryly, but there's trust there, too, and that's what frightens Clare most of all.

"What I'm saying is, the next time I ask you to kill me, I want you to do it."


End file.
